Texas Attorney General SCOPE Act investigation into Reddit (2024)

On 12 December 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced investigations into Reddit and 14 other companies — including Character.AI, Instagram, and Discord — over their compliance with two Texas statutes governing minors' data: the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, also known as HB 18, and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA).

The SCOPE Act imposes obligations on platforms that are likely to be accessed by minors, including requirements around collecting and sharing the personal data of those under 18, limits on targeted advertising to minors, and parental-consent requirements for children under 13. The TDPSA is Texas's comprehensive consumer-privacy law. The Attorney General's announcement framed the inquiry as part of a broader push to enforce protections for children online against major technology platforms.

For Reddit, the investigation reflects the growing patchwork of state-level child-safety and privacy laws that platforms must navigate. Reddit's user base skews adult relative to some social networks, but it nonetheless hosts large numbers of minors and must account for how its data-collection and advertising systems treat them under Texas law. As an investigation rather than a filed lawsuit, the matter creates compliance obligations and the possibility of future enforcement, but it is not itself a court case against Reddit.

The action sits within a wider wave of state attorneys general scrutinizing how online services handle children's data, and it parallels other regulatory pressure Reddit has faced over minors — including its age-verification rollout in the United Kingdom and a separate UK regulatory matter. State-level enforcement of this kind has become one of the most active fronts in technology regulation in the United States.

Because the investigation remained at the inquiry stage in the available record, with no publicly reported suit filed specifically against Reddit, this entry should be read as documenting official scrutiny rather than an adjudicated finding. It is included because being named as a target of a state attorney general's child-privacy investigation is a notable, verifiable regulatory event, and because it illustrates the state-law dimension of the legal pressures on Reddit's data practices.